2015 has been a year of transition for me, of dismantling the structure of my life and rebuilding a reality infused with my truth. I have allowed my power to be strengthened by the Divine, which has in turn stretched my capacity for surrender.

In any transition, up-level, or huge leap forward, there’s inevitably some darkness. While this has been a really exciting year, it’s also been really challenging, full of days and weeks cloaked in doubt, fear, and inertia. I think I’ve cried more in these twelve months than I have in the last twelve years combined.

Through that darkness, some serious light has emerged. First, my beautiful business, which surprises and delights me every single day, has grown into a life of its own. That alone leaves me in awe and gratitude. Second, I’ve released unhealthy relationships and invited in new people that love me as I am and make my life so much richer. Third and most important, my inner life has blossomed in the freedom I’ve afforded it.

I’ve reintegrated the practices of prayer, worship, and spiritual warfare that I grew up with and woven in newer practices like mantras to ancient goddesses, deep lucid dreaming, archetypal exploration, and regular work with spirit animals. Combined, it feels like I have the inner life I’ve always dreamed of but could never quite “achieve.” There were always pieces missing. I always resisted pieces of me, thinking that I couldn’t or shouldn’t bring together all the spiritual practices that I found nourishing because they were from different faith traditions. Now I feel whole.

Bringing together all of my spiritual practices was a game-changer. There’s something explosive and magical that happens when you acknowledge and embrace all of you who you are, even if that means being a living contradiction in the eyes of the world. In a single day, I might offer a mantra to the Goddess Parvati, engage a demon in spiritual warfare, say the rosary, worship God with song, go deep into the prayer of yoga, and play in an enchanted forest with my lioness, dragon, falcon, and wolf. In the same day, I may shift between the warrior, queen, and healer archetypes – my holy trinity. I may address God as my inner flame, my lover, my breath, and my friend.

Here’s the truth of this year: When I devote and surrender to a spiritual practice, no matter what it looks like, it carries me forward through the darkness and deep into the profound nature of my life light.

photo by Chelse Thompson

p.s. here’s my theme for 2016.

The first time I read The Desire Map by Danielle LaPorte, it resonated but remained separate from my spiritual practice. Prayer existed in one layer of me and desires in another. As I began practicing core desired feelings (CDFs) and making choices through the lens of my CDFs, my spiritual practice and my desires began to merge. My CDFs became both the prayer and the answer, they were a language through which the Universe could speak to me and offer guidance.

“You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: You are a divine being. Therefore, your desires are divine. They are the ardent fingerprint of God in you. Your divinity comes to life in desire. Dwelling in desire, listening to desire, articulating desire is praying. It’s the same for meditation. The practice of listening and self-mastery gives desire a divine voice. Desire anchors you in awakening. Desire carries the voice of God guiding you into truth. Desire provides a place for your divinity and humanity to converge and be expressed in everyday life.

If you haven’t read Danielle LaPorte’s work yet, I highly recommend it. Core Desired Feelings ground you in desire, which lights the way with truth as you adventure through the terrain of your inner life.

This is part one of Desire and the Divine. Check back next week for part two. I’ll reveal the practices and rituals that sustain Divine Desire.

photo by Frontierofficial

Five years ago I drove from Albany, NY to Hansville, WA. Alone. Those five days in the car broke and rebuilt me. As I white-knuckled it through horrific thunder storms in Wisconsin, ascended impossible inclines on the way into Yellowstone, and drove down miles of completely empty highway in Montana, fear hovered on the edge of every thought. Each time I felt it close in, I said “perfect love casts out fear.” It’s part of the bible verse 1 John 4:18. Dwell in love and fear can’t get a foothold. Dwell in love and you arm yourself against doubt. Dwell in love and you fortify yourself against destruction by your own hands.

I shared these words with a friend a few years ago and she asked what “perfect love” meant, because it sounded impossible. Perfect love is the dance between you and God. Perfect love is the moment you surrender to the desire of the Divine. Stepping into the profundity of your natural light is perfect love. Laying your head upon the blazing heart of the Universe is perfect love. Devotion, however humanly imperfect, is perfect love. You, here, breathing and reading is perfect love. The sacred being that you are at your core and your fingertips is perfect love. The soul life, with it’s honey-like sweetness, is perfect love. Your soul is perfect love. Your bones and blood are permeated by soul. Your mind is wrapped in soul. Your skin whispers of soul. Your whole being is a constellation of perfect love.

When it feels like life is testing my mettle, “perfect love casts out fear” rises in me. It slips into my consciousness with the effortlessness of a muscle memory. It rebuilds my strength. It turns the lights back on. And it often accompanies an image of a beautiful artist selecting a star from the sky, cracking it open ever so delicately, and pouring all that twinkling light right into me. Then I get to walk around all day pretending to be a mere mortal. In reality I’m starlight and fire breathing in a body.
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beautiful photo by Alexey Kljatov

Each morning I rise with a new understanding of the golden battlefield before me. This mask came into my life about eight years ago after a very intense guided meditation. I’m just now stepping into the rich, dense darkness of its lower half. Slowly sinking into the realization that the darkness of her isn’t something to suffer through, avoid, dread or fear. She is the depth and ferocity of the Warrior Priestess. She is the vanquisher, not the vanquished. She is the conquerer, not the conquered. She is the fire bearer bent on burning down the untruths that keep us bound and blind. She is the liberator.

How are you befriending your darkness?

photo credit | Nana B Agyei

My favorite kind of prayer is the kind that prays me:

There is beauty at the edge.
The way your fingertips tremble.
The way your toes curl around the corner where rock falls away.
The way peace passes between your lips.
The way commitment sets your jaw.
You are beauty at the edge.
Leap into Love.
Don’t get trapped in anticipation.
Let it form and dissolve
as your feet leave the earth.
Hurl your beautiful body into gossamer air.
Air that rejoices in
your courageous heart
your breathless lungs
your declaration of truth.
Air that whistles and whispers against
your enchanting neck
your curving spine
your graceful hips.
Air that supports
your vaulting forward
your tumbling out into everything
your falling into elegant newness.

Sometimes the words of war are all I have to describe
those moments when Evil holds its foot to my throat.
No longer a stalking shadow, but a snarling presence
hell bent on my entrapment.
Self-doubt, paralyzing fear, immobilizing poison flowing towards me.
I can smell it acrid on the air, the thick scent of my own destruction.

It touches against my skin and shudders away,
for I am a Daughter of the Light,
a bearer of brightness
twinkling from every curve of my consciousness
and burning away the battle field.

The Divine says, “Nothing can take you from me.”

It is my destiny to stand guard at the door between
this heartbreakingly fragile reality and the battle fields beyond.

Armored. Watchful. Ablaze.

I walk the wall of the inner kingdom.
A temple priestess, born with the sinewy fearlessness of defense.
A warrior priestess, not of this world, but etheric and eternal.

Arch my supple soul in your hands
and make music from the tender vibrations
of my desires, my wanting, my fullness, my love

Join our flesh together,
like the curling notes of a symphony

For we together are born to dance,
Swallowing stars and licking light off our lips

Run a thumb along the spine of my soul
and I will bend into a bow into the cave
of Your fiery heart.

Breathe me as you might a breathless body
turning these trembling lungs into their awakening

Play me between your legs like a cello
cradled, secure, and surrendered to our song.

At the beginning of every Energy Therapy session, I go through an inner routine: centering, grounding, attunement. Centering allows me to fully inhabit my body. It’s the practice of stretching my soul into the farthest reaches of my fingertips and toes. Centering reifies who I am and how I want to feel during the session. It enables me to keep a crisp boundary between your energy and mine. Grounding often consists of imagining actual roots growing deeper into the ground and anchoring around the fiery earth center. The final step, attunement, is all about you. It’s when I step into your energy field and vibration. It’s the first time I fully feel what’s going on in your chakric system. Those first few seconds feel like the tuning of an orchestra. A beautiful cacophony of emotions, stories, and scars, some clearer than others.

After that first sequence, I check your Chakras with my pendulum and begin to clear, align, heal, and create. The work tends to flow seamlessly as your energy field shifts and responds to intentions and movement. However, in almost every session there’s a split second when I want to run away from the task at hand. That’s the moment I relish most because it tells me I’m standing toe to toe with your resistance. As with any practice, your place of resistance is a barrier to work through and a compass pointing to where needs the most attention. Meeting your resistance allows me to identify your places of deepest need and figure out how to best meet those needs and set you free.